Sunday, September 13, 2009

Collide

RIGOR and INNOVATON are hostile notions.Choose your magistery.No myn can serve bothwithout hating the one and loving the other, or he

will be devoted to the one and despise the other.Unless of course you detach from both, put themin play—let neither win or lose and see what risesup in revelation: auto-poetic emergency.

Always look to the language.(C.H.)(Pop the Hood)

ON one end of a supercollider, particles arecontained. On the other: anti-particles. The ideais to hurl them at each other for the sake ofcollision so as to see if news might be gainedregarding origins.

You might wonder: how do they “contain” theanti-particles?The particles, sure: build a box.But the anti-particles: how are you going to keepthem in the same place long enough to fomentcollision?

(I sit surrounded by books. Outside: sunshine andwind in the willows. I walk on three legs.)

Only an open conflict of ideas and principles

can produce any clarity.

Argument is essential for its own sake. (Karl Popper)

Even if all were agreed on an essential

proposition, it would be essential to

give an ear to the one person who

does not.(J.S.Mill)

(Sampling specimens from Christopher Hitchens,Letters to a Young Contrarian.)

Without Contraries is No Progress (Wm Blake)

AS-IF we built it & students came because the joyof mind-minding mindfully was as delightful as sexorsoccer, guitar or good will hunting and nor merelyto take-the-credit-&-run and any tantalizing tid-bitof gee-whiz awesome was icing on the cupcakes &I'm out of here.

"…the object of the world of ideas as awhole is not the portrayal of reality - this wouldbe an utterly impossible task - but rather to provideus with an instrument for finding our way aboutmore easily in the world."

RIGOR and INNOVATON are hostile notions.Choose your magistery.No myn can serveboth without hating the one and loving theother, or he will be devoted to the one anddespise the other. Unless of course you detachfrom both, put them in play—let neitherwin or lose and see what rises up inrevelation: emergency.

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville